Stepping Through

There was a world waiting for me out there. I could feel it. I could feel the pull of the life waiting for me beyond the portal. I was nervous, of course. None of us knows what that life will be that pulls us out of this world and into a strange alien place. The past is far more alien than we ever realise, that is, until it pulls us into a life, to find ourselves there in a world that – more often than not – bears little or no relation to this one.

Then we find ourselves living a life that we have to learn as we go along. Always trying not to make stupid mistakes, trying to get along with the people we meet there and trying to make sense of the age we find ourselves in.

No-one – as yet – has been able to discover whether the lives we inhabit when we are pulled do actually exist. After all, these are the lives of ordinary people. At least, they have been so far, not one of us has found ourselves pulled into a life of someone famous enough, or – luckily – infamous, enough to make the pages of history.

Usually, it is the life of some ordinary person, some lowly peasant, Roman soldier, Renaissance merchant, puritan layperson, Scottish crofter or some other such ordinary life.

Neither are we sure what it is about those lives that pulls one of us in. We just see the portal’s pulsations alter as it changes frequency – and colour from green to a deep blue – and one of us feels the urge to step forward. Then we go on walking until the blue envelops us and we step on through to a completely new world, a new life.

Last time I stepped through, I found myself sitting at a table in an Inn, sometimes around the Seventeenth Century, I think. The drunk woman sitting on my lap, looked up at me and mumbled something. I looked down to see my hand was high up her skirt, just resting there as I'd pulled through. She made it - rather explicitly - clear that she expected me to get back to doing what I’d been doing before the interruption made by the pull, not that I knew what I'd been doing, but I could guess. So as in all such situations, I improvised and judging by the way she looked at me afterwards, I'd done a far better job of it than she'd been expecting. I got a long deep kiss for my troubles too.

None of us know how long these pullings will last either, she was just about to kiss me and I was back in the blue, then back here. Other times, such as when I was a Roman centurion on guard duty at Hadrian's Wall, I was there for months, in the bitter depths of Winter, before coming back here less than a second after I'd pulled though.

All I know now is the blue is pulling me and I cannot stop myself from now stepping thr....

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]